updated 11:55 am EDT, Wed March 28, 2012

Adobe Flash and AIR udpate with 3D focus

Adobe updated Flash and its offline parallel AIR with a heavy emphasis on gaming, but also with new payment rules. Flash 11.2 on the desktop will now have "premium features" to both get hardware-boosted graphics along with domain memory, but these won't be automatically free, Adobe said. Starting August 1, any Flash app that uses these "console quality" features and earns over $50,000 in app revenues will have to pay a royalty to Adobe.

As part of the move, game developers would have the option of producing games running the Unity 3D graphics engine in web form using the higher-end Flash features. Games such as Shadowgun were cited as examples.

AIR 3.2 would in turn hope to close the gap in performance by bringing Flash's existing Stage3D acceleration to apps compiled into native Android and iOS form. The technique purportedly improves native graphics rendering by a thousand times over earlier versions. Games can still use other native hardware and software, such as iOS' Game Center and Android's NFC recognition.

All of the premium performance features from Flash 11.2 will be free to use in AIR 3.2, regardless of how much money the app makes.

The release of Flash 11.2 is the first since Adobe dropped mobile Flash and won't ever be brought to Android or other mobile devices. Adobe mostly sided with Apple in deciding that HTML5 was better for cross-platform, standards-based web support.

Interesting

I have to wonder what moron would report revenues from an application to the developer, and what right the developer has to any form of royalty whatsoever. Is this a paradigm shift that Adobe is trying to foist upon the public. certainly would't put it past them, but this is a pretty pathetic scenario!

Just what Flash needed!

What a great way to reward the developers who chose to stick it out with a dying technology — charge them for their success. What happened to Adobe? Their software and people seemed to be so good and they seemed to care about their customers... now what? Hundreds upon hundreds of dollars for upgrades to software where is only noticeable change is a new UI to learn. Please! Someone rescue Adobe.

Just clarifying

They are only charging the fee if you built your game using other tools, and then want to play it through the Flash Player using Adobe's new compiler option

Adobe does not charge for the use of the Flash player, only for their tools to create content.

If you're not going to use Adobe tools to build your game, but still want to deploy to the Flash player, shouldn't Adobe get something for all their hard work it took to make that possible for your game?

Oh, and Adobe will not charge anything if your game is deployed to an App like for iPad or Android, this only applies to browser games.

All Apple does is hand content to ios users and takes 30%, you dont think this huge step from Adobe, which otherwise would not allow your game to exist isn't worth 9%